This is a repository copy of Ordering the City : Revolution, Modernity and Road Renaming in Shanghai, 1949–1966. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/170231/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Howlett, Jonathan James orcid.org/0000-0002-1373-0737 (2021) Ordering the City : Revolution, Modernity and Road Renaming in Shanghai, 1949–1966. Urban History. ISSN 0963-9268 Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can’t change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Ordering the City: Revolution, Modernity and Road Renaming in Shanghai, 1949–1966 Jonathan J. Howlett University of York NOTE: This is the accepted manuscript version of an article that will be published in a revised form in the journal Urban History, published by Cambridge University Press. Abstract: Between 1949 and 1966, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed more than one in seven of the city’s roads. Renaming was an important marker of revolutionary change in China’s largest and most foreign-influenced city. Road renaming in socialist China has been commonly understood to have been extensive. This article argues, however, that the nature and extent of renaming in socialist Shanghai was less dramatic than has been assumed. It demonstrates that renaming was not simply an iconoclastic process, but rather involved the pragmatic weighing of symbolic change against potential disruption. Further, it contends that renaming was driven by a desire to order the city, in line with the CCP’s modernist worldview. In May 1966 the Shanghai Municipal Construction Bureau received a letter from a Comrade Lu Liang. The letter drew attention to the plight of the residents of Laji Tang (Rubbish Pool) Street in Yangjiadu district, Pudong.1 Today, Pudong, on the eastern bank of the Huangpu River, is a hyper-modern business hub, boasting a futuristic crowd of skyscrapers. In 1966, the area was a muddle of warehouses and slums. Across the river sat the grand neo-classical architecture of the skyscrapers and banks that lined the city’s famous Bund, which had been constructed in the century that had followed Shanghai’s opening as a treaty port in 1843. Shanghai had been at the heart of colonial activity in China. It had become the largest city in Asia: an industrial and commercial powerhouse, dwarfing all competitors with its sprawling growth, ostentatious wealth and extremes of inequality. Amongst the legions of migrants drawn I am grateful to Oleg Benesch, Robert Bickers, David Clayton, Christian Henriot and Koji Hirata for their insightful comments on drafts, and Liu Yajuan for her assistance with materials. Urban History’s anonymous reviewers provided thoughtful suggestions. This paper was presented at the Oxford China Centre in June 2020. The author would like to thank the organisers and attendees for their insights. 1 Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) B11-2-145-14, Shanghai Shi Chengshi Jianshe Ju guanyu genggai Laji Tang Jie luming de qingshi baogao, 17 May 1966. 1 to the metropolis were the residents of Rubbish Pool Street, squatters who lived in ramshackle buildings.2 Comrade Lu expressed incredulity that, seventeen years after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949, the name Rubbish Pool Street remained unchanged, despite being an obvious legacy of the old society’s contempt for the poor.3 This article joins Comrade Lu in questioning how this unfavourable name persisted for so long in socialist Shanghai. It argues for a reappraisal of the nature and extent of revolutionary transformation in urban China, through the issue of road renaming. It concludes that renaming was constrained by logistical factors and the CCP’s wish to avoid disruption. In addition, renaming was motivated by another aspect of socialist ideology: a desire to order the city in the name of modernity and production. As Marxists, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s leadership believed that the character of Shanghai had been degraded by the ‘semi-feudal and semi-colonial’ economic and social structures that had shaped its development over the previous hundred years, as well as by the ‘reactionary’ rule of their predecessors, the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) government of 1927–1949. ‘Liberation’ (the CCP’s term), in May 1949, was portrayed as an epochal transformation, marking the birth of a ‘New Shanghai’. The CCP’s propaganda presented the city as the site of a symbolic battle against the legacies of the exploitative old society, and as a showcase for the power of socialism to lift people from immiseration.4 The counternarrative to this rosy picture, promoted by overseas observers, including many who had known Shanghai before 1949, focused on the extremes of violence and disorder that characterised the Maoist period as mass mobilisation campaigns were deployed to reorder society, with devastating human costs.5 In the context of both characterisations, we might perhaps join Comrade Lu in wondering why a trivial matter such as changing the name of Rubbish Pool Street went unaddressed for so long. Historical geographers have shown that ‘spatial inscription’ (giving names to places) is an important mechanism by which governments assert social and political control.6 The field of 2 Christian Henriot, ‘Slums, squats, or hutments? Constructing and deconstructing an in-between space in modern Shanghai (1926–65)’, Frontiers of History in China, 7:4 (2012), 499−528. 3 SMA B11-2-145-14. 4 Shanghai jiefang shi nian bianji weiyuanhui, Shanghai Jiefang Shi Nian [Ten Years of Liberated Shanghai] (Shanghai, 1960). 5 Zheng Nian’s bestselling memoir Life and Death in Shanghai is representative this type of account: Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (London, 1988). 6 Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman and Maoz Azaryahu, ‘Geographies of toponymic inscription: new directions in critical place-name studies’, Progress in Human Geography, 34 (2010), 453–70. 2 critical toponymy has explored place renaming as an activity that creates cultural tension, as officials attempt to inscribe dominant political and cultural ideologies onto cities in moments of transformation. 7 Revolutionaries across the globe have used toponymic renaming to reinforce temporal breaks with the past, distinguishing the ‘new’ society from the ‘old’. Inscription of new names on signs, maps and other documentation has been an universally significant way in which radical political ideology has been manifested in ordinary people’s lives.8 In the Soviet Union, almost half of all place names were ‘Sovietised’ after 1917.9 Similarly, the French revolutionaries of 1789 had changed place names in a burst of iconoclasm, rejecting Christian or monarchist forms in favour of revolutionary appellations.10 In some regards, renaming in Maoist China (1949–1976) followed similar patterns with widescale renaming taking place across the country to eliminate references to former regimes, old culture and colonial legacies, in accordance with the CCP’s socialist and nationalistic ideology. Nowhere was this process more marked than in the city of Shanghai. These renaming processes have, however, received little attention from historians.11 Between 1949 and the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the CCP-led municipal government of Shanghai renamed around 220 of the city’s roads.12 This amounted to more than one in seven of the approximately 1,400 roads in Shanghai in 1964.13 Renaming was one part of a broader process of urban transformation that reshaped Asia’s most well-known former treaty port. While recognising that renaming is an important symbolic act, 7 Representative works include: Reuben S. Rose-Redwood, ‘From number to name: symbolic capital, places of memory and the politics of street renaming in New York City’, Social & Cultural Geography, 9:4 (2008), 431– 52; and Maoz Azaryahu, ‘The politics of commemorative street renaming: Berlin 1945–1948’, Journal of Historical Geography, 37:4 (2011), 483–92. 8 Brenda S. A. Yeoh, ‘Street names in colonial Singapore’, Geographical Review, 82:3 (1992), 313–22. 9 Anaïs Marin, ‘Bordering time in the cityscape. Toponymic changes as temporal boundary-making: street renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg’, Geopolitics, 17 (2012), 192–216. 10 Peter McPhee, The French Revolution, 1789-1799 (Oxford, 2002), 137–8. 11 Existing works have mostly focused on the meaning of place names, rather than renaming processes: Huang Wenchuan, ‘A comparison of politics of street names in Taipei and Shanghai’ in Ding Yannan, Maurizio Marinelli and Zhang Xiaohong (eds.) China: A Historical Geography of the Urban (Cham, 2018), 137–61; Li Huajun, Zhongguo chengshi jieming zhengzhi secai chuyi [A preliminary study on political street names in China], Xidian University MA Diss., 2002; Yao Xiaoyi and Cai Junmei, ‘Shanghai chengshi jiedao mingming de yuyan liju yanjiu’ [The study of linguistic motivation for naming Shanghai streets and roads (sic.)], Journal of Hebei University (Philosophy and Social Science), 33:1 (2012), 150–53; Zhang Baojun, ‘Shanghai jiedao mingcheng de renwen jiazhi yanjiu’ [Study on the humanistic value of Shanghai road names (sic.)], Journal of Shanghai University of Electric Power, 30 (2014), 81–2. 12 Shanghai diming zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui (eds.), Shanghai Diming Zhi (hereafter SDZ) [Gazeteer of Shanghai Place Names], (Shanghai, 1998), Chapter 7, Section 2. URL: http://www.shtong.gov.cn/Newsite/node2/node2245/node70862/index.html, accessed 27 Jul.